Friday, 18 May 2018

Open season on gambling

Is this the slippery slope I see before me? .. Yesterday, FOBTs were a uniquely evil gambling product that allowed
people to spend £100 in 20 seconds. Today, it has been noticed that you
can bet 10 times that amount in half the time on your mobile phone. At
7am this morning, the government had bravely decided to rid Britain of
the greatest cause of problem gambling the country had ever seen. By
10am, expectations were being managed and we were hearing the same
slogans that always follow nanny-state announcements. They are the same
slogans we heard two weeks ago when minimum pricing was introduced in
Scotland and the same slogans we heard a month earlier when the sugar
tax began: ‘No silver bullet… You’ve got to start somewhere… This is a
good first step…’. And so it begins.

Sure enough, today's Guardian editorial is drooling over the prospect of clamping down on gamblers and the gambling industry...

Britain should follow Australia’s lead in banning gambling adverts around live sporting events, but even that is not enough while firms can plaster their names across football shirts and grounds.

.. It is possible that Thursday’s decision on FOBTs could prod the sector
into curbing its excesses, recognising that a failure to regulate itself
will bring fresh pressure and, ultimately, further action by the
government. It seems more likely that – as for its customers – the lure
of a big payout may overcome rational judgment. The government is right
to make it clear that “responsible gambling” is a matter for the
industry, not just individuals. If the firms will not shape up, they
must be forced to do so.

Meanwhile, the Times is celebrating a 'victory for morality over money' and eyeing up the internet...

Regulation is not always seen as unwelcome meddling and this should
be a lesson for a government often too timid to intervene in the market
when the social good or competition requires it.

Yet there is a
fundamental flaw in looking at betting machine stakes in isolation:
almost every person now has the potential for a FOBT in their pocket
with the proliferation of smartphone casino apps. Many of these allow
significantly more than £100 a spin. Whether ministers have the will to
take on this fight as well remains to be seen.

Tracey Crouch, the minister who fought hardest to rid Britain of FOBTs, has signalled that she is keen to make yesterday's announcement the start of a wider battle against gambling, starting with the lottery...

UNDER 18s will be banned from playing National Lottery games under a radical gambling shake-up unveiled by ministers yesterday.

The Culture Minister Tracey Crouch said she will “gather evidence” on
the effect they have on younger teens currently allowed to play.

.. It has been criticised in the past for “luring” kids into gambling with scratchcards based on games such as Monopoly.

There are plenty of them. If FOBTs are fair game, so are lots of other gambling activities. Anti-FOBT campaigners claim that problem gambling is more prevalent among gamblers who play the machines than those who engage in any other form of gambling but, like much of what they say, this is not true. To quote the most recent evidence from NatCen:

The highest rates of problem gambling were among those who had participated in
spread betting (20.1%), betting
via
a betting exchange (16.2%), playing
poker in
pubs or clubs (15.9%), betting offline on events other than sports or horse or dog
racing (15.5%) and playing machines in bookmakers (11.5%).

These statistics don't tell you anything about what 'causes' problem gambling. Problem gamblers tend to play lots of different games and the more niche the game, the more likely you are to find problem gamblers playing it. And, for all their notoriety, FOBTs are fairly niche. Fewer than five per cent of the population play them in any given year.

Nevertheless, if the government thinks that it can address problem gambling by stamping out the activities in which problem gamblers are over-represented, it's got four targets to aim for. And if it wants to tackle people who are 'at risk of problem gambling' - a fictitious new category that has been invented to inflate the scale of the problem - online gambling is at the top of the list.

This suits Derek Webb, the founder of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, who last year promised to go after online once he'd finished with the bookies. British casinos, arcades and pubs have little to fear from a campaign against internet gaming and may feel that they are already so tightly regulated that there is little more the government could throw at them.

About Me

Writer and researcher at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Blogging in a personal capacity.
Author of Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism (2015), The Art of Suppression (2011), The Spirit Level Delusion (2010) and Velvet Glove, Iron Fist (2009).

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."